The DOBES program for the documentation of endangered
languages, started in September 2000, has just completed its pilot
phase. Eight documentation teams and one archiving team worked out
agreements on formats, tools, naming conventions, and encoding,
especially the linguistic level of encoding. These standards will form
the basis for a five-year main phase, which will include about 20 teams.
In the pilot phase, strategies to set up an online archive incorporating
redundancy and regular backup were developed and implemented. Ethical
and legal aspects of the archiving process were discussed and amounted
to a number of documents to which all participants have to adhere to.
Tools and converters developed within the pilot phase are available to
others.